Relay – A Family History Blog

I’ve spent many years working on the Swartz/Schwartz Family of southeastern Indiana (aka Clark and adjoining counties, including Jefferson County KY really) and Pennsylvania. When John Swartz and Elizabeth Ohlweiler pioneered in 1803 in Clark County their children began creating a web of family connections that has become incredibly complex over the last 200+ years. The Swartz pioneers, the Jacobs pioneers, the Bottorff pioneers, the Prather pioneers and several other families have intermarried so frequently I can have some very odd mismatches between predicted relationships with DNA and the actual relationship following just one line of descent.  This is often called a “multiple relationship” situation.  It’s not technically Endogamy, although if it had continued for a few more generations, it sure would look like endogamy.

What usually throws me for a loop, however, is the intergenerational entanglements.  For example-

Elizabeth Swartz, oldest daughter of John and Elizabeth married Solomon Jacobs, youngest son of Jeremiah Jacobs, jr. and Rebecca Dowden.  Her brother Jacob Swartz married Rebecca Jacobs, who was Solomon’s niece, the oldest daughter of Thomas Jacobs and Mary Holman. AND Elizabeth’s youngest sister, Sophia Swartz married Moses Holman Jacobs, who was Solomon’s nephew, second son of Thomas Jacobs and Mary Holman.  And then Susan A. Swartz, second daughter of Elizabeth’s middle brother Rev. George Swartz marries Thomas Asbury Jacobs, who was the middle son of Thomas Jacobs and Mary Holman as well as brother to Susan’s Aunt Rebecca Jacobs Swartz and uncle Moses Holman Jacobs.

And this isn’t a unique situation – there are similar marriages between Bottorff and Swartz generations and between Prather and Swartz generations.  And of course, similar patterns exist between other family pairs that don’t include the Swartzes. These were large families so the youngest children of one generation are often younger than the oldest members of the next generation.

I have no idea what to call these marriage patterns and these relationships.  Sometimes they are “straight-forward” double cousins but sometimes they are cousin-uncle??

Often, in obituaries of members of these families, the local newspapers refer to “their dense thicket of cousins.” I have to laugh.  I have often referred to my modern family, with full blood, step and foster siblings, as my family thicket.  Little did I know, it wasn’t an original label.